Astonishing facts about the workings of brain in learning

Brain continues to mature throughout most of life; the brain does not mature at the same rate in each individual. It is now known fact that the brain is plastic — it changes with experience and development. It is important for us to understand that maturation of the brain influences learning readiness.

There are things that happen to us in the process of learning that we think are bad, but in the real sense are blessing in disguise. Below are some facts about brain that will amaze you:

Forgetting isn’t always bad: Most of the time, it’s natural and essential to remembering and learning. Forgetting serves as a powerful spam filter: Whenever you’re trying to recall a word or fact, your brain has to actively suppress, or forget, competing information. What’s more, the way memories tend to fade over time actually aids subsequent learning.

If you sit down to study a load of material, of a truth you won’t remember most of it the next day. You have to go back and build your knowledge. it’s not that you don’t remember well, or you’re not a good learner. It’s that forgetting is a critical part of learning.

The brain is a foraging learner: The human brain evolved to pick up important and valuable pieces of information here and there, absorbing cues from daily life, overhead conversation, all the time, and put it all together. By foraging in this way, the brain is building knowledge continually, and it’s not only during study or practice and we are not always aware of it.

Below are the steps to take to aid your learning:

— Breaking up and spacing out study time over days or weeks can substantially boost how much of the material students retain, and for longer, compared to lumping everything up a day.

— Varying the studying environment — by hitting the books in, say, a cafe or garden rather than only hunkering down in the library, or even by listening to different background music — can help reinforce and sharpen the memory of what you learn.

— A 15-minute break to go for a walk or trawl on social media isn’t necessarily wasteful procrastination. Distractions and interruptions can allow for mental “incubation” and flashes of insight — but only if you’ve been working at a problem for a while and get stuck.

— Quizzing oneself on new material, such as by reciting it aloud from memory or trying to tell a friend about it, is a far more powerful way to master information than just re-reading it.

It’s only through repeated application of “information about something” that ideas are transformed into deep comprehension, real ability and useful “real world” skills.